The Reaper didn’t thrive as a King. He wilted and stumbled, he faltered and failed, he whittled his endurance and hostility to bare bones and managed to triumph only through vigilance and acrimony, hatred and contempt. The savage beast, the monstrous Lord, only flourished under mutinous bouts of terror, of danger, of treachery, slinking and slithering beneath outcrops of darkness and vile, persistent anarchy. The eldritch abomination only succeeded under a reign of demolition and ruin, promising, assuring death and desecration, devastation and annihilation; he breathed ammunition and sedition, granted it like a hurricane, like a ghost, like a wraith, rapping his scythe against bark and branches, against fir and pine, against the endless, swarthy plumes of heresy. The brutal, barbaric titan only advanced when everything seemed against them – when determination carved a nettle, a spine, a barb, in the phantom tremors of his heart, when puissance sculpted a tempest, a storm, a terrifying, welcome manifestation of enmity, down into the reaches of his Mephistophelean soul.
 
That time was now.
 
Deimos reached out past the stones and rubble, past the chilling, turbulent winds, past the icy caverns and their memorized pathways, past mirrors that saw more than just reflections, rushing into the maddening world of Stygian pursuits and gloaming tirades. His steps were predatory, wicked things, striking against soil and earth, dust and limbs, bracken and broken, collapsed ideals, wreaking calamity as he marched against his failures, against his defects, against each and every flaw he seemed to possess. There were so many – haunting and gliding, dominating and masterful, weaving their way down into the vigilant contortions of his movements, so all anyone ever saw, ever heard, ever witnessed, were the chains of his imperfections (nonchalant and impassive, detached and isolated, as desolate as the rest of his body; Lucifer’s crowned masterpiece). His faults were eternal and never fleeting, presented in the spider web of scars or in the silent composition of his marble figure; a quiet, chilling opus, a bold, audacious weapon, a cold-blooded killer and monarch of mountains and snow. But here, here in the dusk, in the trees, in the hollowed thicket of merciless beings, he was just another one of the monsters, dim and brooding, stark and defiant, a heartless, remorseless foe eager to take the world on his shoulders again and again, for them. It was always for them.
 
He ceased abruptly at the sound of collisions – some weapon smacking against trees (a horn, a sword, a cutlass?), rushing through groves, crashing and intending to annihilate something, someone, and he stood to listen, breathe in the scent of another –
 
Thranduil. It sparked, incensed, rolled against his brain, his mind, his skull, like a machine, blistering and scorching, malicious and vicious. His first notion was an overwhelming, beseeching rage, curling and coiling, unfurling and unrolling, down into the lengths of his limbs and marrow, because he didn’t know where the other Lord had gone, disappeared, or run off to. He’d never been informed to the hows, the whens, the whys of his absence, just chosen to accept it as another one of their own snagged and tangled by something else entirely. It’d always been an endless pattern, and he’d thought Thranduil stronger than the pull, than the snare, of other things (that his avaricious greed had been enough to keep him on a throne, surrounded by crowns and gilded ambitions). But to know, to see that the Thief had remained, instead of explaining, instead of clarifying, irked, irritated, and exasperated the demon, the infidel, and he stepped forward into their training area, all prowess, all power, all domination and supremacy, head raised and subversive to the last. “Thranduil,” his voice uttered, untamed, leaning on a tether of either hatred or incomprehension, attempting to maintain composure (remembering the Forsaken, then the Clovenheart), gaze puncturing, piercing, menacing, clawing for truth beyond the aspirations. His stare fixated first on the golden beast himself, then the companion, and the marks across trees, the weapon in his grasp. “You have been busy.”